NPR Fresh Air: Dr. Anna Lembke on pleasure, pain, and addiction

I don't have a problem really with considering the experience of feeling balanced and in equilibrium as a pleasure.

The bogie-man I am always on the lookout for is the identification of any particular type of pleasure as higher or better than the rest, because then I think the advocate of such a position has fatally undermined the logic of the position that "pleasure" is the greatest good.

I prefer to think of the pleasure of eating ice cream while also feeling in balance, or in equilibrium, as the best way to describe what is being discussed.

At any particular time I think we're experiencing a lot of different pleasures (and pains, unfortunately) and at a high level we're looking for the net sum of everything. We might be crippled or have lost a leg, and have pain in our remaining stub of a leg , but otherwise be living a confident and successful life full of all sorts of pleasures. It wouldn't be right to say that the pain we experience in that situation doesn't exist, but it also wouldn't be be right to say that the loss of the leg totally ruins a life that is otherwise highly pleasurable.

I don't think you're likely to go in the direction I am concerned about Don, but I am very confident that the Okeefe "Epicurus had a special definition of pleasure as absence of pain" crowd (not to single him out but just as an example) *would* go in that direction. They are constantly defining katastematic pleasure as the highest pleasure, saying that active pleasure (including joy and delight) are useful only to get to that state of painlessness, and strongly planting in the minds of their readers that that state has nothing to do with what ordinary mortals think of as "pleasure" at all.

There's no doubt that certain portions of the texts can be read that way, and I can't say enough bad about that position, so it's a constant struggle to make sure that it doesn't creep in when in truth the waging of a campaign against it (and thus to place ordinary pleasure back in its rightful place, as per Gosling & Taylor, Nikolsky, and yes even DeWitt) is probably one of the main reasons for this forum.

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Godfrey so you are saying she sums pleasure and pain together to get a "net result" number which she then charts?

No, what she calls pleasantness and unpleasantness are represented by opposite directions on an axis of hedonic valence (+ and -). This axis is intersected by an axis of arousal, with intensity of calm in one direction and intensity of agitation in the other direction. I don't think she's trying to describe pleasure and pain; she's trying to illustrate what her data is showing her regarding what she calls "affect".

Epicurus didn't have access to today's neuroscience. He was working with observations and against Platonic abstractions. LFB's work is among the latest neuroscience so I find it extremely interesting and potentially useful that her conclusions in many ways seem to correspond with Epicurus' conclusions. Her "affective circumplex" is a modern model which is devoid of Platonic distraction. As an initial observation, I interpret "affect" as similar to "the faculty of feelings". As such, what might be considered maximum pleasure would be a point on the "pleasant" side of the hedonic valence axis and intersecting the circumscribing circle. This would represent maximum pleasantness with neither too much agitation or too much calm.

More on the affective circumplex (pleasure graph?):

It doesn't rank pleasures such as mental v visual or chocolate ice cream v pistachio.

"Absence of pain" (or absence of unpleasantness) would be anywhere on or to the right of the arousal axis. So it's not a mystical state, it's a range of "pleasures" including elation, gratification and serenity at any given time.

Correcting my previous post, maximum pleasure would be any point on the circle to the right of the arousal axis. So maximum pleasure might involve being very calm, but it might also involve being totally stoked, man. Or anywhere on the right side of the circle in between.

Is there some reason for the circle rather than just the two axes?

That's an excellent question! Apparently it's not as I've been interpreting it. I've been thinking of the circle as a limit, but some googling reveals:

Circumplex: a circular depiction of the similarities among multiple variables. (APA Dictionary of Psychology)

The circumplex model focuses on determining how traits and emotions are structurally similar, and its underlying assumption is that a relatively seamless circular odering, or circumplex, is an economical description of the relations among traits and emotions. (from an introduction to an out of print book on circumplexes)

So I think that anything being mapped would occur on the circle and not within it. This is actually even more interesting because the intersection of the axes could be considered a neutral state, but if all states in this model must occur on the circle itself then there is no neutral state.

Perhaps someone else is more familiar with this idea?

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So Epicurus was "right" in a sense that there is no neutral state. You're either feeling pleasure or pain.

Anytime someone says "So Epicurus was 'right'..... you can expect me to agree, however:

I'm not able to take the time to read Feldman and comment on the analysis other than what you guys are saying.

The reason I am posting this comment is that as to the position that there is no "neutral state," I want to go on record as not being sure whether that position was intended to be something that he was taking on based on observation (such as on observation of babies and kittens and puppies) or whether that is a position he took on some kind of "logical" ground, as he did in the case of the swerve, and of the existence of the void. If it's the latter, that would be another reason to be cautious in drawing parallels with neurological or medical research.

Personally, I doubt that the denial of a neutral state is of as much practical significance as it is of "logical" significance in debating with Plato on the nature of pleasure as the greatest good.

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Is it me or do the "two coexistent aspects" sound somewhat like the arousal axis on the circumplex?

Don I think I need some translations but to my way of thinking regarding Nikolsky's quote in #28, tranquility and painlessness correspond to places on the the arousal axis and the valence axis, respectively. And as you say it seems like the passive aspect and the active aspect could correspond to the arousal axis. I'm not sure about that though; the circumplex and kinetic/katastematic are two completely different models and it's probably a stretch to equate them too closely.

As to the lack of a neutral state, I think that it has practical significance in visualizing and understanding pleasure in addition to logical arguments. Understanding the interaction of degrees of pleasure and arousal is useful in finding guidance from your feelings. As LFB explains, our feelings are often influenced by things we don't expect. The more we understand and notice about our feelings, including whether or not we have a neutral state, the better we can use them for guidance.

Getting back to the original post in this thread, I believe the Dopamine Nation author stated that there is a neutral state of dopamine (arousal, production, reaction?). I may be way off base, but I think that this corresponds to one axis in the circumplex model. Regardless, it seems to be another contemporary neuroscientific approach to pleasure and it might be interesting to compare this to the circumplex

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If you're alive you're either feeling pleasure or pain

I agree that that's an important point.

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Especially katastematic as "static", I'm needing to delve deeper into the original texts where that and its derivations are used.

I think if you eventually find the time you will find what you're looking for in Gosling & Taylor's "Greeks on Pleasure." It's stated there (somewhere) that the whole issue doesn't seem to derive from motion, because everything is always in motion, and If i recall correctly you'll find documentation there that the Greeks considered even thinking to be a form of motion. So the whole issue is clear as mud (which is why I find it so unhelpful).

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I should also do a search for what papers cite Nikolsky to see if we can expand on his ideas with other (of any) authors.***

Good idea, but like I said, I think Nikolsky himself cites Gosling and Taylor as HIS inspiration (or else he told Elli and me that in a skype call we had several years ago). So the key analysis started with G&T and what Nikolsky added (if I recall) was basically to track it down to the "division of Carneades" as the likely reason that Laertius picked it up (since Laertius was telling his readers how several philosophers/issues fit under Carneades' categories).

Don I think our issue here, and the main difficulty in articulating this, is that there is an ambiguity / mismatch between English "Feeling" and Greek "pathe" --- It sounds like Epicurus said there are only two pathe / passions, but in English we have many "feelings" which are neither pleasurable nor painful.

I touch a piece of wood and it's "hard" but the feeling is neither necessarily painful nor pleasurable. Now we can attempt to deal with that by referring perhaps to other experiences at the same time (we're taking pleasure in simply being alive) but we have a communication mismatch to deal with between English "feeling" of which there are many, and Greek "Pathe" of which there are only two.

So if we could triangulate on a better word for "pathe" that is not the same as "feeling" we'd probably be better off. Apparently the translators prefer "passions" but the bad guys have loaded that word so negatively that it may not be usable for this purpose.

What do you see as the preferred translation of "pathe"?

Passion? Or what?